A service provider (such as a work processor) usually is limited in regard to the quantity of requests it can service in a period of time. In case of multiple consumers (applications) requesting simultaneous execution of services with respect to the work processor, a need arises to give priority to one or more of the applications without resorting to denial of service or starvation for the rest of the applications.
An example of this concept is arbitrating the access of multiple applications to a shared storage device. All storage devices have a technological limitation in regard to how many or how large Input/Output requests they can complete within a given period of time. When multiple applications have access to a shared storage, some of the applications' requests may need to be executed with higher priority than others. Usually neither the applications nor the storage device implement a system that provides arbitration of submitting requests to a shared work processor. This may result in unfair usage of the shared work processor.